Best 456 quotes in «artists quotes» category

We were in Julie’s room one night, my eldest daughter and I, maybe a decade ago now. I wanted to show her how the canvas painting she had carefully labored over for her little sister's Christmas gift was framed and hung on the wall. I said, gazing at her masterpiece with no small amount of motherly pride, “Now it looks like a real work of art”. Bella looked at me quizzically, wondering yet again how her mother could possibly understand so little about the world. “Mama, every time you make something, or draw something, or paint something, it is already real art. There is no such thing as art that is not real” And so I said that she was right, and didn’t it look nice, and once again, daughter became guru and mother became willing student. Which is, I sometimes think, the way it was meant to be. ~~~~~ art is always real. all of it. even the stuff you don’t understand. even the stuff you don’t like. even the stuff that you made that you would be embarrassed to show your best friend that photo that you took when you first got your DSLR, when you captured her spirit perfectly but the focus landed on her shoulder? still art. the painting you did last year the first time you picked up a brush, the one your mentor critiqued to death? it’s art. the story you are holding in your heart and so desperately want to tell the world? definitely art. the scarf you knit for your son with the funky messed up rows? art. art. art. the poem scrawled on your dry cleaning receipt at the red light. the dress you want to sew. the song you want to sing. the clay you’ve not yet molded. everything you have made or will one day make or imagine making in your wildest dreams. it’s all real, every last bit. because there is no such thing as art that is not real.

What a major mistake, having rejected pretty much all of the great talented female artists that have lived throughout the ages, art history is left incomplete. The validity of the written art history is as absent as those women left out.

What an artist seeks, he finds without looking for it.

What did I think? Right then I was thinking about my father, specifically his habit of treating everyone with courtesy and consideration, of how he used to stop on lower Division Street and converse genially with old black men from the Hill whom he knew from his early days as a route man. His kindness and interest weren't feigned, nor did they derive, I'm convinced, from any perceived send of duty. His behavior was merely an extension of who he was. But here's the thing about my father that I've come to understand only reluctantly and very recently. If he wasn't the cause of what ailed his fellow man, neither was he the solution. He believed in "Do unto Others." It was a good, indeed golden, rule to by and it never occurred to him that perhaps it wasn't enough. "You ain't gotta love people," I remember him proclaiming to the Elite Coffee Club guys at Ikey's back in the early days. Confused by mean-spirited behavior, he was forever explaining how little it cost to be polite, to be nice to people. Make them feel good then they're down because maybe tomorrow you'll be down. Such a small thing. Love, he seemed to understand, was a very big thing indeed, its cost enormous and maybe more than you could afford if you were spendthrift. Nobody expects that of you, asny more than they expected you to hand out hundred-dollar bills on the street corner. And I remember my mother's response when he repeated over dinner what he'd told the men at the store. "Really, Lou? Isn't that exactly what we're supposed to do? Love people? Isn't that what the Bible says?

What I say is misdirection, what you see is an illusion and what results is magic.

What they, in their innocence, cannot comprehend is that a properly constituted, healthy, decent man never writes, acts, or composes.

What we get when we turn pro is we find our power. We find our will and our voice and we find our self-respect. We become who we always were but had, until then, been afraid to embrace and live out.

When dealing with writers it breaks down like this: a regular writer is your average everyday megalomaniac. Like every artist, there's a part of them that believes--nay, knows--the world turns for them. Most are harmless. Some are obnoxious. Some are Bret Easton Ellis.

When I discovered music — when I discovered the craft of shaping a song — my being fell into place.

When I feel too much and the universe aches inside of me.

When I look over my shoulder, I see Jamie watching me with the same adoring smile time he has from the first time I met him. Jamie is not a starfish. Not even close.

When I was young and I was forced to watch Disney films, I would fast forward the good guys, wasn't interested in princes and princesses, only by the villains.

When Verlaine and Rimbaud were young,” [Snyder] said, they were protesting the iron-grip bourgeois rationality had on all aspects of nineteenth-century French culture— the manners, the view of reality, and the exclusion of ‘the wild’ from public life. Rationality in business and society were dominant values. ‘Deranging the senses’ was one strategy artists like Verlaine and Rimbaud employed to break free of that. “Today,” he continued, “the bourgeoisie is sociopathic, overindulged, distracted, spoiled beyond measure, and unable to restrain its gluttony, even in the face of pending planetary destruction. In the face of such a threat, it has, by necessity, become the responsibility of the artist to model health and sanity.

When respecting the statue of a venerable person, don't forget to respect the artist too who made that statue!

When one's craft is rooted in strong relationship, he or she lures the into becoming a part of the show.

When your heart jumps every time your camera locks focus...You've become a photographer.

...when you look at a photo or realistic drawing of a face, you see it as the face of another. But when you enter the world of the cartoon, you see yourself.

You are alone, So alone, You speak back to silence. People call it loneliness, You call it solitude, Different words, Meaning the same pain.

[W]hile devices cannot replace imagination, they can certainly influence it and even mould it. Devices are there for the artists to use if they so wish. With them they can say new things in a new way, or even old things in a new way. Or, if they choose, they can ignore the devices and say new things in an old way, or old things in an old way.

Women born works of art, men doomed to spend entire lifetimes trying to create just one.

Words do not always need a destination. We can leave them behind us at the borders of feelings. Running around headless in the vague zone. And that is the privilege of artists: to live in confusion.

Writers and artists know that ethereal moment, when just one, fleeting something--a chill, an echo, the click of a lamp, a question—-ignites the flame of an entire work that blazes suddenly into consciousness.

#Writers, #artists , and #poets don't get the respect they deserve until they are either dead, or they cut off an ear Mozaiah T.

Why not fall in love with an artist? Otherwise there are no letters, pictures, paintings and songs for you when you wake up.

Without passion, the earth will be full of hollow bodies devoid of love, relationship, religion, art, science and technology

Yes, but the artist?" said Nigel almost fiercely. "He's different, you know he is. He's driven by some compulsion: if he can't do what he knows he has to do with his life he might as well be dead. He's got to break through the world's indifference, or else break himself against it. He can't help it.

You are on my side," she says. "What side is that?" I ask. "The winning side," she says, and smiles. "The team of the artists." "Who are we playing?" "The barbarians," she says. "We are always playing them.

You are up against what people will always call the ways of the world - and the ways of this country, which does not kill artists so much as it kills the rationale for art, in part by insisting that the artist must be a successful member of the middle class, if not a celebrity, to be a successful artist. And that to do otherwise is to fail art, the country and yourself. Should you decide that writing is your way to serve your country, or to defend it, you are almost always writing about the one it could become.

You can't make a fan of everyone. Stay true to your story, characters, music, art or whatever it is you do and fuck everyone else who doesn't like it. Life isn't perfect.

You can survive without artistry, but you cannot live without artistry.

You can't force creatives into a box. If you try, they'll no longer be creative. And no one will want your box.

You have to believe that your voice can mean something. You have to believe that what you do matters. And you have to keep going even on days you can't find that belief. If you can't do it for yourself, you do it for all the other young souls who need to be shown that things are possible. That they too can do that thing they dream of. You do it despite the doubts and the struggles. You do it because it's what you came here to do. That's what makes an artist.

You forget, my good man, that what the artist perceives is, primarily, the difference between things. It is the vulgar who note their resemblance.

You must learn to bend to open windows, my friend. That is why artists and dancers are closest to God. They clench their chests every day to salute the Creator, while opening up portals to the universe. The artist mediates and prays as he/she creates, knowing somewhere, deep down --- creativity is the highest transmission of love.

You kind of attribute this magic to music and as you meet the people you realize that they don’t contain the magic. They just channel it a little bit sometimes, but they never possess it. They never own it.

You'll find that great artists don't love, live, fuck or even die like ordinary people. Because they always have their art. It nourishes them more than any connection to people. Whatever human tragedy befalls them, they're never too gutted, because they need only to pour the tragedy into their vat, stir in the other lurid ingredients, blast it over a fire. What emerges will be even more magnificent than if the tragedy had never occurred.

You might think of a thought as an invisible, innocuous little thing. Something that barely exists. But a thought is something hard to conceal. Hold a thought and it melts all over your hands. Touch something else and now you’ve left traces of it. Hide it under your shirt and it bleeds through.

You never needed wings to fly, You only needed love.

A bad magician never gets the good props.

A 'black' man who draws a 'black' person with big lips is called observant. A 'white' man who does the same is called a racist.

A Bohemian life, filled with poetry, it cuts like a knife, without coquetry!

Actual artists are like mythological creatures,' she heard herself opine. 'You hear about them, but a sighting's pretty rare.

After all, Paul Robeson said, ‘Artists are the radical voice of civilization.’ Each and every one of you in this room, with your gifts and your power and your skills, could perhaps change the way in which our global humanity mistrusts itself. Perhaps we as artists and as visionaries, for what’s better in the human heart and the human soul, could influence citizens everywhere in the world to see the better side of who and what we are as a species.

After being hurt by the world so much, they began to see the demons within humans. So without hiding it through trickery, they worked to express it.

All artists give birth. It's alchemy and it's really an amazing process.

A great artist is conscious of the talent and the power he possesses, otherwise he would not see his faults, and so would not be able to improve.

A great magician is as divine as God and his stage is as majestic as the paradise.

A great magician is not more magical than other magicians; he is just more magical in his presentation.

All free spirits are not artists, but all artists are free spirits.

A great piece of music make people to close their eyes but a great magic effect make their eyes wide open.